Venus and Adonis (1593): Shakespeare’s Translation Memory

Abstract

Venus and Adonis, a narrative poem adapted from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was Shakespeare’s first work to be printed with a dedication to a patron in which he claimed authorship. Although Venus and Adonis is not a translation in the stricter meaning of the term, and was not marketed as such, Elizabethan translation practices as originating in schoolroom exercises designed to improve mastery of Latin and reliant on memory techniques are crucial to understand how the poem was composed and how it was received. This article will argue that in Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare alludes to schoolroom exercises, and more precisely to the method of “double translation” advocated by Roger Ascham: that he composed his poem thanks to memories of grammar-school translations of Ovid, and aimed to trigger similar memories in his readers.